Insects

Category archives for Insects

…is to add an actual human. Dynastes granti – Western Hercules Beetle, Arizona It’s funny how our social primate brain works. We gain immediate emotional access to an image simply by inserting a member of our own species. (Incidentally, that’s one reason why David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth is so effective. With Attenborough able…

Those of you who haven’t got an ad blocker installed have probably seen this ant floating about in a promotional banner in the ScienceBlogs sidebar: I can’t speak for how others react to this image. Most, I imagine, filter it out as yet more clutter on the screen. But for a picture of an insect…

Nature photographers William & Matthew Burrard-Lucas explain the magic behind some recent images of mosquitoes emerging from their pupae. While they list the equipment and lighting they used for the session, the key factor seems to have been the determined patience with which they watched pupae develop over two weeks so that they’d be able…

Ectatomma edentatum, Argentina Equipment details: Canon EOS 20D, using an MP-E 65mm 1-5x lens (at 5x), lit with an MT-24EX twin flash diffused through tracing paper. Several years ago, before I became serious about photography, I shot the same species in Paraguay with a little Nikon Coolpix 995. Here’s the result:

…these would be the beetles of choice. Onthophagus taurus dung beetles, showing size and horn variation among males. Dung beetles in the widespread genus Onthophagus sport a bewildering array of horns. Not only do the horns of different species vary in shape, size, and the body part from which they grow, many species show a…